What is SendGrid?

SendGrid is a top cloud-based email platform that effectively delivers over 18 billion of customer engagement emails every month for Internet and mobile-based companies such as Pinterest, Airbnb, Pandora, Spotify, Hubspot, Linkedin, Uber, and FourSquare, as well as traditional companies such as Walmart, Intuit, Taco Bell, and Costco.

SendGrid has been established as an API company. It has been built to serve developers and makes it fast for companies to send email regardless of their environment. It allows you to send email over SMTP or HTTP, or if you want, even use one of the company’s official client libraries. In a few minutes, your company can send your first email and more.

Overview of SendGrid Benefits

SendGrid provides cloud-based email delivery services that assist companies with transactional email management while at the same time abiding by anti-spam regulations. The tool manages various types of email such as friend requests, shipping notifications, email newsletters, and sign-up confirmations. In addition, the tool manages Internet service provider (ISP) monitoring, sender policy framework (SPF), domain keys, and feedback loops.

Additionally, the tool provides open rate reporting, link tracking, and CAN-SPAM compliance. SendGrid also allows businesses to track email opens, bounces, unsubscribes, and spam reports without any use of code.

SendGrid virtually eliminates the complexities that usually go along with sending corporate emails on a large scale. SendGrid improves deliverability for your application-generated email.

Deliverability – SendGrid has a highly qualified team who are focused on nothing else but email deliverability and compliance. The team includes Paul Kincaid-Smith, a renowned email expert who has nearly 30 years of experience working with email and on fighting the war on spam.

This team has fostered close relationships with the leading mailbox providers – Gmail, Yahoo and Outlook.com. Together they work with SendGrid via an industry association called MAAWG – the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group to fight spam, phishing, denial of service attacks, mobile spam and other forms of email abuse.

SendGrid has sent over 400 billion emails to date. To put that in perspective, that’s more emails than there are stars in the Milky Way, or more emails daily than Twitter sends tweets.

Customer Service and Support – SendGrid offers 24/7 customer support and a dedicated team of customer success managers who deliver personalized support and guidance to its customers. Available via phone, chat, and email, SendGrid’s team of 25 technically trained success engineers have corresponded with customers over 175k times in the past year.

Overview of SendGrid Features

SMTP Service

Custom API Integration

Open & Click Tracking

Email Template Engine

Unsubscribe Tracking

Reputation Monitoring

Suppression List Management

Dedicated & Multiple IP Addresses

IP Whitelabeling

SMTP API

ISP Monitoring

SPAM Filter Testing

Domain Level Load Balancing

Parse Webhook

Feedback Loop

DKIM Customization

SMTP Relay

Sub-user API

24/7 Support (Phone and Chat)

Marketing Email Services

What Problems Will SendGrid Solve?

Scenario 1

Transactional email has essentially become business critical for application-based businesses. It’s the driver by which they communicate with their subscribers, grow their customer base, and drive revenue. Flash sale or daily deal sites rely on transactional email to deliver time critical messages to their audience and once purchased, to confirm the sale. Retailers use email to deliver shipping notifications and order confirmations – both of which provide opportunities to upsell other products. Location-based apps rely on the timely delivery of transactional email to connect friends and businesses. Moreover, transactional email boasts the highest open rates in the industry and actively spurs engagement among its recipients.

Today, there are a host of new uses for transactional email since the rise of web and mobile applications in the marketplace help transactional email take its long awaited place in the world of email marketing.

Scenario 2

Transactional email open rates can be three times higher than commercial email. Why? Customers are expecting them – even welcoming them – because they took a certain action in which they expect to receive a communication from you. They may have placed an order, signed up for your service, submitted a friend request, or asked to be notified of certain events. As a result, they are more apt to open your email.

A report from Borrell Associates, Inc. and Merkle revealed that 64% of consumers consider transactional emails to be the most valuable messages in their inbox.

Why Transactional Email is Fantastic for Marketing

Deliverability: The BIGGEST advantage of transactional emails over newsletters is deliverability. Transactional emails are more positively perceived by the average recipient. Based on actions of recipients, the relative nature of the content of the two types of email and several other contributing factors, ISPs push a higher percentage of newsletters to the junk folder, as compared to transactional mail.

Anticipation: The nature of the transactional email lends itself to be anxiously awaited. When you post a photo on your favorite social network, forget your password, sign up for a new service or purchase a new gadget, you have a tendency to monitor your inbox a little more closely – you want to see who left a comment, find out your new password, click the verification link and receive confirmation that your order is in progress. This anticipation leads to a certain inexplicable excitement and increased appreciation for the arrival of the email and its contents.

Captivation: The level of attention, focus and concern for the clickable words within a highly anticipated transactional email results in the proverbial “captive audience” – ready and willing to read whatever you have to say. Why? Because they know at least part of your message is of a certain value to them.

Action: When receiving a transactional email, the recipient is ready to click, expecting to be asked to do something: “Click here to activate account”, “Navigate here to check the status of your package”, “Log in to your account to see more details”. In contrast, when opening a newsletter, the expectation is to consume the information presented and possibly take action at a later time.

Organizations have diverse wants and requirements and no software solution can be just right in such a condition. It is futile to try to find an ideal off-the-shelf software app that fulfills all your business needs. The smart thing to do would be to adapt the application for your unique requirements, staff member skill levels, budget, and other aspects. For these reasons, do not rush and invest in well-publicized trendy solutions. Though these may be widely used, they may not be the perfect fit for your specific needs. Do your groundwork, look into each short-listed application in detail, read a few SendGrid reviews, speak to the maker for clarifications, and finally choose the application that presents what you need.

How Much Does SendGrid Cost?

SendGrid Pricing
Plans:

SendGrid offers 3 pricing plans. Before signing up for any of them you can try out the 30-day free trial that gives you access to the Essentials 40,000 email plan. You can send 100 emails/day for free forever and store up to 2,000 contacts within Marketing Campaigns.

Essentials Plan – $9.95/month

Up to 40,000 emails/month

Price per extra email – $0.001

Shared IP

SendGrid Marketing Campaigns

DKIM customization

APIs and webhooks

Pro Plan – $79.95/month

Up to 100,000 emails/month

Price per extra email – $0.00085

Dedicated IP

All features of the Essentials plan, plus:

Subuser management

Premier Plan – custom pricing

5+ million emails/month

Custom price per extra email

All features of the above 2 plans, plus:

Customer Success Manager for 5 million+ emails

Prioritized support for 5 million+ emails

User Satisfaction

We realize that when you make a decision to buy Communications Software it’s important not only to see how experts evaluate it in their reviews, but also to find out if the real people and companies that buy it are actually satisfied with the product. That’s why we’ve created our behavior-based Customer Satisfaction Algorithm™ that gathers customer reviews, comments and SendGrid reviews across a wide range of social media sites. The data is then presented in an easy to digest form showing how many people had positive and negative experience with SendGrid. With that information at hand you should be equipped to make an informed buying decision that you won’t regret.

What are SendGrid pricing details?

SendGrid Pricing
Plans:

SendGrid offers 3 pricing plans. Before signing up for any of them you can try out the 30-day free trial that gives you access to the Essentials 40,000 email plan. You can send 100 emails/day for free forever and store up to 2,000 contacts within Marketing Campaigns.

User reviews

User reviews in total: 12

Average Rating:

Sign up with email

The most favorable review

Cassandra

3 months ago

Pros: SendGrid is a powerful and robust tool. We were using Mandrill but are glad we changed to SendGrid. We have custom branded the user interface and sending domain. The API is robust and the documentation is top rate. The stats and tracking features are powerful. The app enables us to provide various levels of access based on user role.

Cons: The SendGrid website is hard to navigate as the design is bit difficult to understand. But there are no issues with the software itself.

The least favorable review

Anonymous Reviewer

4 months ago

Pros: SendGrid integrates nicely with Azure and .NET and on the surface it seems like a great product.

Cons: Customer support and account handling/security is a nightmare. They suspend accounts without notice or reason and hurt business. Do not trust these guys to have your back in production.

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